A hotshot Harvard Medical School infectious disease physician should at least have a more prominent publication record. If there is evidence that actually backs this up, great. Publish it under peer review.
There is a shady industry in chronic antibiotics for "chronic lyme" which is a collection of vague symptoms, which fly in the face of antibiotic therapy, and for which the "recommended" testing rejects the official CDC testing and can only be provided by cash-only "proprietary" laboratories. The physicians who do this, all conveniently happen to be cash only...
It's not that ridiculous. She has only been an attending physician for 2 years, having graduated from Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation residency in 2014.
However, she is not an infectious disease physician by training, which is important to keep in mind, depending on how you look at things. PM&R does work with spinal cord and traumatic cerebral injury, which is why she argues that chronic lyme is similar. However, PM&R is not typically the specialty running point on antimicrobial therapy planning.
Still - most people who are going into a field of research (and who have a mentor on top of things) should have at least a poster at a major convention of the society of their field, a case report, or something, by the end of residency. A completely blank pubmed record is not unusual, but unsettling for someone making these kinds of claims.
This could be one case where using a preprint server like the http://biorxiv.org/ would be key. Getting positive peer reviews when peers are opposed in principle is hard: no amount of data will convince them.
That said, she stated to be new to the field. She should have a publication record from work in her prior field of research.
The problem with chronic lyme - the data for it is extremely weak, in the form of single case reports or small case series that have been poorly written. And getting in pubmed is not the problem - nowadays, you can cough onto a poster at a conference and it will show up. Furthermore, infectious disease docs are easy to convince if you have good data - it is one of the more experimentally accessible fields in medical science. When the spirochete for Lyme was isolated and cultured, and the initial antibiotic treatments proven, the field was quick to accept it.
That plus we see a steady stream of patients mistreated and told they have "chronic lyme" that end up in the hospital due to antibiotic complications, or because the "lyme doctor" told them to stop their other medications, gives a lot of us pause regarding anything mentioning "chronic lyme".
A hotshot Harvard Medical School infectious disease physician should at least have a more prominent publication record. If there is evidence that actually backs this up, great. Publish it under peer review.
There is a shady industry in chronic antibiotics for "chronic lyme" which is a collection of vague symptoms, which fly in the face of antibiotic therapy, and for which the "recommended" testing rejects the official CDC testing and can only be provided by cash-only "proprietary" laboratories. The physicians who do this, all conveniently happen to be cash only...